The Romanian Testing Conference brings together the “world’s Rockstars of Quality Assurance and Software Testing.” The conference hosts a range of sessions and workshops to deliver valuable content, discuss the latest trends, and share experiences of the best in the field.

This past May, several Softvisioners attended the 2018 Romanian Testing Conference. Read on to discover what they learned.

This presentation talked about how perception, attention, memory, knowledge and problem-solving techniques can impact your mind. The speaker, Goran Kero, noted that knowledge is gained from experience. He also revealed the different approaches to problem-solving, stating that brainstorming is not as useful as taking an individual approach. Overall, this session reminded the audience that the mind is the most important testing tool.

“Beware the pickle” with Ard Kramer and Beren Van Daele

This session covered different QA scenarios from all over the world, and focused on how being a part of a team can affect your ability as a tester. The speakers pointed out that when we work in a team we become the brine of a pickle, taking on the taste of what’s in the pickle jar. In other words, we can lose our independent thought, we lose our skeptic mindset, stop seeing what’s wrong, focus on the same skills, and see no reason to argue. The most destructive thing we can do, according to the speakers, is to make everyone on the team conform. This leads to loss of individuality and decreased the ability for spotting bugs and defects. The solution? They recommend that people should change things on a regular basis to see different points of view. Also, ignore anyone who says “we’ve always done it this way” – always try it your way. The main things to keep in mind are mindset, skills, and aptitude. Keep them yours, not as part of a group, and you can change your way of thinking and keep your individuality.

“Thinking critically about numbers: Defense against the Dark Arts” with Laurent Bossavit

In this session, participants examined a series of claims to learn how to apply critical thinking to your own observations, interpretations, and reports. Participants learned that to properly investigate a statement, you should analyze claimants based on existing biases, sources, trust, and motivation. Also, analyze claims based on constructs, observations, metric, generalization, representation, and inference.The idea of claims or statements in this session was associated with acceptance criteria and specifications in testing. It’s important to be consistent and precise in testing. If we think something is not right, just because the specs are according to implementation, you can always challenge specifications. This is the difference between a generic test engineer and a proficient engineer.